Is it ethical to pay to see a Johnny Depp film?
It’s a question I found myself considering after attending a preview screening of Ebenezer, having just paid to see a Johnny Depp film. Not exactly the moral high ground. Still, acknowledging a contradiction isn’t quite the same thing as resolving it, and I didn’t go for Johnny Depp. I went to see A Christmas Carol.
I fucking love A Christmas Carol.
I’ve acted in it, co-directed it, written two adaptations of it (including a panto), recorded a complete, unabridged audiobook and watched practically every screen version ever made for a podcast. I reread the novella every Christmas. At this point, I’m probably better acquainted with Ebenezer Scrooge than with some members of my family.
So I was never going to need much persuading to see another adaptation, however unnecessary it might be. And unnecessary is, unfortunately, a word that kept occurring to me throughout Ti West’s Ebenezer.
Despite a tagline promising “the name you know, the story you don’t”, this is, fundamentally, for better or worse, A Christmas Carol. Scrooge is a miser, Marley is dead (but not to begin with), three spirits arrive, lessons are learned. There are embellishments, but very little that substantially reimagines the story or its central character, and what reimagining there is tends to be the least successful part. The title is less the promise of a psychological study than an acknowledgement that this is, above all, a star vehicle: as the opening titles put it, “Johnny Depp in… Ebenezer.”
Depp isn’t bad, though neither is he especially revelatory. His Scrooge is a cantankerous, sarcastic, occasionally cartoonish creation, with the actor leaning heavily into his familiar repertoire of eccentric mannerisms. Yet his facetiousness is entirely defensible. Dickens’s Scrooge is not above making jokes, even to ghosts: “There’s more of gravy than of grave about you”, etc., etc. There’s something psychologically interesting about a man trying to maintain his intellectual superiority through humour, even as the supernatural systematically dismantles his sense of control.
Indeed, the film communicates vividly just how little choice Scrooge has in the matter. His ghostly guides don’t so much invite him on a journey of self-discovery as abduct him. I, for one, wouldn’t willingly follow the Ghost of Christmas Past anywhere.
That particular apparition, played by Andrea Riseborough, is extraordinary: a pale, white-eyed, corpse-like woman in a ghostly wedding dress, looking as though she’s escaped from a Guillermo del Toro nightmare. Her movement is unnatural, her presence deeply unsettling. When she suddenly, inevitably, screams, because of course she must, it’s creepy as fuck.
Ian McKellen’s Marley is similarly effective, a truly dreadful apparition worthy of Dickens’s description. McKellen brings an authority and emotional nuance to the role that makes it feel like something he’s been itching to play for years. His scenes with Depp are among the film’s strongest, retaining much of Dickens’s dialogue while amplifying the horror. The result is both faithful and genuinely frightening, proof that the material needs less reinvention than sensitive, imaginative handling.
Tramell Tillman, meanwhile, impresses as the Ghost of Christmas Present, trading the character’s customary joviality for a hearty, gluttonous physicality and a barely suppressed fury. As his allotted time runs out, his abundance gives way to decay: his skin cracks, his temper frays, and his would-be generosity curdles into something altogether more sinister.
These apparitions are where West’s interpretation comes most vividly to life. His approach draws heavily on the lurid Gothic horror of 1960s and 1970s Hammer and Amicus productions, with their theatrical spectres, ominous shadows, extravagant colour and occasional camp excess. Even the title treatment, complete with its copyright symbol, contributes to the calculatedly antiquated aesthetic. There’s also an amusing piece of cinematic self-reference when Scrooge is sucked down into his bed, an unmistakable echo of Depp’s spectacular demise in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Checco Varese’s handsome 35mm cinematography and Eve Stewart’s wonderfully grimy production design lend Victorian London a tangible atmosphere of soot, damp, and decay. Tyler Bates’s richly orchestral score interweaves familiar Christmas carols with darker, more ominous passages, creating an evocative fusion of seasonal comfort and supernatural dread.
Still, the traditional and the bizarre don’t always sit comfortably together. In one particularly grotesque sequence, Ignorance and Want burst from the dying Ghost of Christmas Present’s ribcage and pursue Scrooge. This in close proximity to a peculiar montage cuts between various characters singing Silent Night. It’s a collision of Christmas-card sentiment and full-blooded nightmare imagery, emblematic of a film that never quite reconciles its competing impulses.
West retains Dickens’s five-stave structure, complete with intertitles, and broadly follows the familiar narrative while punctuating it with extravagant Gothic grotesquerie. The horror is not itself an infidelity to Dickens. A Christmas Carol is, after all, a ghost story, and a frightening one at that. Indeed, some of the most effective passages are also the most faithful. Scrooge’s break-up with Belle, drawn from Dickens’s own dialogue, is deeply affecting.
Less successful is the decision to make the young Belle an aspiring novelist who, inevitably, minor spoiler alert, becomes one. It’s terribly on the nose. Why not just have her write A Christmas Carol and go full cheese?
The screenplay is occasionally tin-eared elsewhere too, awkwardly crowbarring in familiar Dickensian expressions such as “dead as a doornail”. Some of its embellishments are simply odd. During Fezziwig’s joyous Christmas party, Scrooge casually remarks that his former employer will one day be knifed to death, accompanied by a brief, startling glimpse of the murder. It’s an extraordinarily grim little character beat, apparently intended to lend Scrooge’s cynicism a little more justification, but so jarring in context that it feels less more like an ill-judged intrusion.
There are welcome moments of warmth, particularly in Scrooge’s eventual visit to his nephew, played with an appealing mixture of sincerity and humour. Sam Claflin is very good as a more intense, sharper-edged Fred than usual, although Rupert Grint’s subdued Bob Cratchit is less memorable, and his final scene with Scrooge feels oddly perfunctory. The film’s emotional successes, like its horrors, tend to come in isolated bursts rather than building into anything genuinely overwhelming.
Which brings us back, inevitably, to Depp. There’s an uncomfortable irony in watching an actor make a major Hollywood comeback by playing perhaps literature’s most celebrated example of personal redemption. And he’s good at it: overstated, certainly, but he sells Scrooge’s giddy rebirth. Yet the parallel is an uneasy one. Dickens doesn’t simply forgive Scrooge because he feels bad about his past. His redemption is demonstrated through what he does next. Whatever one makes of Depp’s public controversies, the rehabilitation of a real person is not equivalent to the redemption of a fictional character. I can appreciate the performance without confusing one with the other.
Ultimately, Ebenezer is a perfectly watchable but remarkably unremarkable adaptation, enlivened by splendidly macabre imagery, handsome craftsmanship and a handful of very good performances. Its strongest moments draw out what was already there in Dickens; its least successful departures undermine rather than illuminate him. For all its ghosts and grotesquerie, it remains more inventive in its presentation than in its understanding of the material.
Perhaps I’m being unfair. I went wanting to see A Christmas Carol, and I saw A Christmas Carol. It was even, intermittently, a rather good one.
But I suspect I’ll be returning to Alastair Sim, George C. Scott, Patrick Stewart, or Michael Caine long before I revisit Johnny Depp.
Bah, and indeed, humbug.
